'Believing Is Seeing' by Errol Morris: Book Review

This is possibly the most astonishing photography book I’ve ever read, and in a number of different ways. If you are particularly interested in looking at good photos, however, this may not be the book for you, because it does not contain many good photos.

Most of the photos it does contain are reproduced as small images, and the reproduction quality is not high. Those few that are large have gutters running through them. Most of the originals are not very good, either. One, a Walker Evans, is arguably great—but what you are shown, large, is a severe crop...with a gutter running through it.

Nevertheless...

Regular readers of TOP are probably somewhat familiar with Morris, whose work has been discussed here before.

Inspired by two sentences in a Susan Sontag book, Morris set off to investigate whether or not the British photographer Roger Fenton staged a photograph he took during the Crimean War (1853–56.) His conclusion is complicated, and I won’t get too deeply into it here.

Suffice to say that in contemporary terms, Fenton most likely staged a photograph—but that neither he nor his contemporary audience would have thought so. He produced a photograph that reflected a particular situation, but he had to move a bunch of cannonballs to do that. He was so innocent of our contemporary attitude that he took two photos of the same scene, a few hours apart, one showing cannonballs and one not, and displayed and published both of them.

Our contemporary view is somewhat different, as a longtime, award-winning Sacramento Bee photographer found out a few days ago. He was fired because he manipulated a photograph of one bird trying to take a frog away from another bird.

I suspect Fenton would have been appalled. Accuracy, he might have argued, is one thing. “Truth” is something else.

So is human charity, which is pretty goddamn short in the newspaper business if you ask me.

As interesting as the Fenton investigation is, it was, for me, the least interesting of Morris’s investigative essays. And, I would add, his investigative technique, for a photo geek like myself, is nearly as interesting as the content of the essays. But not quite as interesting.

The four sections of this book are entitled “Crimean War Essay (Intentions of the Photographer),” “Abu Ghraib Essays (Photographs Reveal and Conceal),” “Photography and Reality (Captioning, Propaganda, and Fraud),” and “Civil War (Photography and Memory).”

Morris really likes parentheses.

Of the latter two essays, the first discusses whether or not Walker Evans manipulated the contents inside a sharecropper’s house to conform to his fairly developed sense of aesthetics; this was hard to decide, and the best we can come up with is, “He may have.”** This essay then meanders into the question of whether or not the FSA photos taken during the Depression functioned as documentation or propaganda, and winds up with an investigation of photos taken during the Israeli-Lebanese war, published by the Reuters news service.

The other essay is about a photograph found grasped in the hand of an unidentifiable dead soldier after the battle of Gettsyburg during the American Civil War. The photo was of three children, and may have been the last thing the dying soldier saw. The photo sparked a nationwide search for the soldier’s wife and children, based on a close investigation of the photo’s content by newspapers all over the country. The search was successful, and the wife and children were found. An interesting and astonishing story, given the media limitations of the time (the photo had to be described, rather than reprinted, in the newspapers.)

But the investigation that really blew my socks off was into the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse photos from the war in Iraq. The first section of this is entitled, “Will the Real Hooded Man Stand Up?”

In the West, the most famous symbol of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison was a photo of a man standing on a box with a pointed hood covering his head, and with electric wires running under a poncho-like garment that he was wearing.

The New York Times ran a front-page story about the hooded man, with a large photo of the man holding a photo of himself standing on the box, with the hood, etc. The headline said, “Symbol of Abu Ghraib Seeks to Spare Others His Nightmare.”

Well, guess what? It ain’t that man under there.

Though he even had the photo printed on his business card, the guy in the hood was somebody else. The proof? Right there in the hooded-man photo: his hand. The man The Times did the story about was in the prison, may have been tortured, but was known as “The Claw” for a mangled hand he suffered when an antique rifle exploded during a wedding party some years earlier. The hooded man’s hands, which were plainly visible, were not mangled.

In fact, to this day, nobody knows who the hooded man was, or if he’s still alive.

Even more interesting, though, was Morris’ investigation of a photo taken of a pretty blond American soldier, Sabrina Harman, who worked at the prison. In a photo that Morris says is much more famous in the Middle East, Harman is shown bending over a dead man, flashing a big smile at the camera and giving a “thumbs up.”

The photo absolutely convicts Harman of...what?

That’s what catches Morris’ interest. He investigates in depth, and among other things (not all of which he discovered himself), he finds that Harman was not amused or happy about the dead man, and that she deliberately took photos so that might have been used in evidence for a murder, when nobody else would do that. They were, he said, evidentiary photos, not photos taken for amusement.

He reproduces letters that Harman wrote to her “wife”—Harman is gay—in which she essentially condemns the Army and the way the prison was run. “We might be under investigation. I’m not sure, there’s talk about it. Yes, they do beat the prisoners up and I’ve written this to you before. I just don’t think it’s right and never have. That’s why I take the pictures—to prove the stories I tell people. No one would ever believe the shit that goes on. No one. The dead guy didn’t bother me, even took a picture with him doing the thumbs-up.” A bit later in the letter, “If I want to keep taking pictures of those events—I even have short films—I have to fake a smile every time.”

Of course, much of what Harman wrote could be seen as self-serving, produced by a woman who saw trouble on the horizon.

But, in Morris’ investigation (he always takes things to extremes) he contacted a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California who was an expert on facial expressions.

The psychologist, Paul Ekman, says Harman was showing a “Say cheese smile” which has nothing to do with pleasure or enjoyment. It is a very specific expression, which he says is well-known to experts. It’s essentially a forced smile, aimed specifically at cameras, and says nothing about the thoughts or feelings of the person behind it. In other words, whatever Harman felt, she wasn’t showing pleasure when the picture was snapped—a photo which led directly to a New York Post headline that said, “The ghoul next door was jail abuse fotog.”

And so on. You really have to read the essay to get the full impact of Morris’ investigation, but one thing is clear—the CIA or some similar black agency committed a murder in the prison, and got away with it, mostly by convicting a bunch of bottom-end soldiers (who were, indeed, guilty of abuse) and convincing the world that justice had been done.

If you believe Morris, it hadn’t been—not even close.

And I believe Morris.

What I’ve just written is a sample of a fascinating book (for those fascinated by such things, anyway.) Believing Is Seeing contains much more, including, somewhat to my pleasure, what I see as proof that Reuters knowingly distributes anti-Israeli propaganda photography.

And the book demonstrates clearly that much too often, “believing is seeing,” but shouldn’t be.

John

*I write books published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, which is owned by Penguin.

**In a conversation I had Thursday with the well-known photojournalist David Burnett, he quoted Arnold Newman as saying, “Five percent of photography is inspiration, 95 percent is moving furniture.” I thought I might steal this quote in discussing the Walker Evans essay (Evans may have moved furniture) but decided I wanted to get the exact wording of what Newman said. When I looked online, I found that not only was Newman cited, but so were several other photographers—and several photographers made the same quip in direct interviews, and were credited with it by the writers....

John Camp is a bestselling book author who writes thrillers under the nom de plume John Sandford. He was formerly a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter.

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by MM: "I appreciate this review and don't want to sidetrack talk about Morris's book, but (with regard to the Sacramento Bee incident) I'm curious how many photographs the reviewer thinks an experienced photojournalist should be allowed to doctor at the expense of his employer's credibility before he gets a pink slip. Two photos? Three? Would it be cynical for the newspaper to assume that the time the photographer was caught was not the only time he had ever submitted a doctored photo, or to assume that if he hadn't been caught he might have done it again?

"As Morris makes clear, notions of 'truth' in photography are elusive at best; that ambiguity is inherent in any representational medium. But let's be honest: most sentient adults are aware that every photo is at best only a representation of 'the thing itself'—in fact, even a small child knows that a photograph of an ice-cream cone is not the same as the ice-cream cone itself. From firsthand experience (their own snapshots) members of the general public know that photos are cropped, and are taken from only one of many possible angles, and that timing and lens choice and other decisions are all highly subjective. That knowledge is part of the public's 'photographic literacy,' the set of mental tools that citizens of the developed world rely on for reading photographs. They are tools every sighted member of the general public has honed from viewing literally millions of photographs (hundreds of photographs a day, in all kinds of contexts, for thousands of days).

"But those tools cannot be used by viewers to 'read' a photograph when a photograph that looks undoctored and is presented as undoctored is in fact doctored (and while the definition of 'undoctored' varies greatly, I've never heard one that allowed for this example). A deliberate attempt by a photojournalist to portray a scene that the camera did not record falls into a different category than 'general ambiguity of the medium,' it seems to me. The fact that every photograph can have multiple interpretations does not relieve news providers of their obligation to leave reportage photos undoctored so that readers might have a fighting chance of reasonably interpreting those photos.

"The Sacramento Bee's punishment (dismissal of the photographer) may seem harsh to those who have not worked in journalism, but every photojournalist knows the rules going in and is reminded of them constantly (John Camp tried his hand at photojournalism, didn't he?). Newspapers in the Internet age have no unique commodity to offer besides public trust, the loss of which would put them out of business entirely. That's why reader trust is a precious asset of which newspapers must be as protective as possible—charity be damned. Call me naive, but given a choice I'll read the newspapers that have a zero-tolerance policy on the doctoring of reportage photos, thank you very much."

What a strange way to begin your discussion. Your account of what happened at the sacremento bee is neither accurqte nor true; the photographer was not fired for (a gross, clumsy, and aesthetically ill-advised) falsification of a phtoto of egrets. Charitably enough, he was only suspended for that. He was fired after the newspaper discovered several other news photos of his which he had altered.

Does anyone honestly think that a news photogrqpher, who knows the standards for news photos and nevertheless chooses to flaunt them (falsely representing his work as meeting those standards), should not be fired? This is a matter which goes straight to the heart of the integrity and the very survival of both journalism and phtotography.

And i say that as a documentary photographer, with a great deal of sympathy for the position of news photographers and a huge appreciation of morris and his work. But i fail to see where "charity" would suffice to excuse the actions of that "news" photographer.

Now that's odd, just yesterday I was reading Erroll's three part essay for the NYT on the Fenton photos. And If you hanen't seen his documentaries please rent some. Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure, Fast Cheap and out of Control, and most of the First Person series are all worth seeing.

A photograph is not a self evident truth. Even the best intentioned Journalist can only hope to create a document. An unreliable one at that.

Take the photographs you have the most confidence in and run the facts to ground, as this author has done. Find out what was really going on in front of the lens. Your pictures will squeal like pigs. I hear squealing almost every time I push a shutter and if you don't, you may not be listening.

It looks like an intriguing book. So much so, that I've got it on reserve in the library system here in Madison. However there are others ahead of me in the queue - did they read this article before me?

Very interesting article. Thanks. I imagine that Errol Morris is often told by colleagues to get a sense of perspective. (I hope he never even tries.) This article confirms that I'm going to end up buying many copies of this book and giving it to people.

Geoff Dyer's forthcoming book on Tarkovsky is another that might be interesting, though I don't always get Dyer in print. I saw him talk a few months back and give an interesting presentation; he was able to convey much more in that small lecture hall that usually he does to me in a book.

I'm sad to say I really don't like this review. What the heck is going on?

Let's focus on the Fenton essay.

I read the Morris essay's on Fenton in the New York Times and I have the book Believing is Seeing right here next to me on my desk.

What makes the essay great is the journey that Morris takes you on, not simply the conclusion. This summary of the essay gives away the ending without capturing any of the flavor of the journey.

The joy in the essay is that Morris starts off with a quote from Sontag regarding a war photo from the beginning of photography. She's respected, so she should be a good source. The issue is that there are two photos of the same scene by Fenton, a road with cannonballs on it, and a road with cannonballs not on it. Which came first--and was Fenton trying to fake something by adding cannonballs to make the place look more dangerous?

Morris starts with the Sontag quote and checks her source-who says he was misquoted. And then starts a series of back and forths--one minute you think the cannonballs-on-the road was shot first, as the next layer is peeled back you start to think the other photo was first. And back and forth it goes the deeper Morris investigates. Each stage of the investigation produces a convincing case until the next layer shows it to be false. Back and forth, back and forth.

You need to read it. It is a fascinating work, regardless of the conclusion.

I have another "crime" that I would happily sack a newspaper editor for - using a stock photograph of something topical - and then getting it wrong.

I have lost count of the number of times I have seen a library photo of a plane or car or something relating to a story when the object in the picture is not only not the one mentioned in the story, but not even the right model......

How come we place so much more emphasis on the honesty of the photographer than we do on integrity of the editors? As this book demonstrates, the biggest lie is usually the caption and the commentary, not the picture.

“A lot of folks want to simply condemn such an image for ‘changing reality’ (which it does and is not an ethical thing for a newspaper), but for nature photography, this brings up something, that to me, is more disturbing. As nature photographers, we are the ‘eyes’ of the public. People believe photography, so we owe it to them to show nature as honestly as we can. I don't want people to get the wrong impression of nature. In this Sacramento Bee situation, the photographer has literally created a behavior of the birds in the final photo that is not real.”

I think Steve Jacob is on the right track in his last paragraph. If we held the editors and writers to the kind of standard we seem to believe photographers should be held to, then almost everyone in the business these days would deserve to be fired.

Rarely does the written word accurately depict anything, and it is no accident.

I agree with you guys 90% of the time -- when a photographer is caught altering a photo, something serious has to be done, pour encourager les autres, but I also think there has to be some semblance of proportion in the punishment. The Bee photographer was accused of altering three photos: he removed a shadow of his arm in one (feature) photo, and altered the birds-fight-over-a-frog in another. In the third photo, of a wildfire, he published the straight version, but in a copy submitted in a photo contest, he enhanced the flames in Photoshop. Neither of the altered, published photos was a "news" shot.

Maybe it's just a personal thing with me, or maybe I'm just not pure enough, but if I'd been running the paper, I would have screamed at him, and suspended him without pay for some serious amount of time...a month, or two months. But I wouldn't take a long-time photographer, publicly trash him so he is no longer employable, and then fire him. That seems pretty heavy to me, especially with the economy like it is. I would definitely have scared the shit out of him, though..

I'd add that when I was working as a journalist, in the early years, I was given a low-level management position at a major newspaper, a position that was generally seen as a place that you would begin climbing from. I didn't climb. I found out that I couldn't fire a helpless and hopeless shlub who was working for me (and we desperately needed somebody good in his slot) because he had a wife and kids and was only a year or two from qualifying for a pension. That single experience made it very clear to me that I was not cut out for management, because I was incapable of doing things that, objectively, had to be done. My girlfriend is also a longtime journalist, perhaps of a more decisive mind that I, and she says she would have fired the photographer instantly. I just wouldn't have. My sense of justice would have been offended. And anybody who says it detracts from the seriousness and the reliability of newspapers, hasn't been reading newspapers. The most famous journalists (I'm speaking of columnists here) lie daily.

@ Darren and Rob -- I'm sorry you didn't like the review, but, it was an extremely difficult book to review, because the devil was in all the details. You can't really express all the details of a book, without rewriting the book, and this book is made up of tiny details. It is not, however, a mystery -- I was not exactly giving away an ending, since the endings were sort of implicit in Morris' beginnings. I do like Darin's characterization that "What makes the essay great is the journey Morris takes you on..." and I wish I'd written that.

It's not the facts of the story that heightens my already low regard for the paper, it's the hypocrisy of the situation. What reporter does not 'highten' the emotion/impact of a story by selecting one word over another? What editor does not alter the verbiage of a reporter's writing to make clearer the intent, the meaning? And what photograph is NOT manipulated? Photography has always been held to a higher 'standard' than any other media, and I've felt for a very long time it is a silly, and in this case outright destructive, standard. This obviously talented photographer has had his career destroyed over what can only be described as a two-faced policy. A sad story indeed...

But let's be honest: most sentient adults are aware that every photo is at best only a representation of 'the thing itself'—in fact, even a small child knows that a photograph of an ice-cream cone is not the same as the ice-cream cone itself. From firsthand experience (their own snapshots) members of the general public know that photos are cropped, and are taken from only one of many possible angles, and that timing and lens choice and other decisions are all highly subjective. That knowledge is part of the public's 'photographic literacy,' the set of mental tools that citizens of the developed world rely on for reading photographs. They are tools every sighted member of the general public has honed from viewing literally millions of photographs (hundreds of photographs a day, in all kinds of contexts, for thousands of days).

I would say that most people don't understand that fully. In the most literal sense, they do realise that a photograph is an image not an ice-cream, but probably a large proportion can't tell the difference between a staged shot and a truly documentary shot. They usually aren't aware that the photo of the ice-cream is quite likely not ice-cream or the "serving suggestion" picture on the front of their cornflake box is actually cornflakes and lard, not milk. They also often can't understand how a photograph can manipulate the impression of a scene. I've lost count of the number of times people have said "When did you see that? I thought you were stood next to me all the time!"

One of the most striking examples of this is the famous Vietnam war picture of a guy with a pistol pointed at his head. The picture speaks of fear, threats and torture, but the film footage of the same scene shows the guy dragged out and shot almost instantly and has none of the feeling of the photo which captured just one tiny point in time.

After many years of accumulating books and running out of room to store them, I finally disciplined myself into dividing books into two categories: books I'd like to read, and books I'd like to own. I just finished reading a library copy of this book, and it did not make the cut of becoming a book I'd like to own.

I would describe Morris' book as a somewhat interesting journey that ended up having no destination. Along the journey I kept wondering where we were going, and we never got there. I don't consider reading this book a waste of time, but I am glad it was a library copy I read.

There are so many onion-layers of nuance and shades of grey when it comes to photojournalism, coming to any firm conclusions seems like nailing jello to a wall. I think everyone can agree that obviously Photoshopped altered images are egregious violations of journalistic ethics. The deliberate darkening of O.J. Simpson's face on the cover of a national newsmagazine? Another obvious violation. But how about all the dodging/burning and other darkroom manipulations applied by W. Eugene Smith for his brilliant photo essays? Or the darkroom removal of a distracting hand from the foreground of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother"? Is that still kosher? The distinctions just get finer and finer. All the stuff that is cropped out of the final image, the parts of reality just outside the frame, represent essential context that is amputated by the very act of image capture. Unless (and perhaps, even if) there is journalistic and editorial integrity behind the entire enterprise, all photojournalism and documentary photography can greatly distort or even actively obscure reality.

Re the comments by MM and S.Chris: You make a reasonable case for the photog's punishment; I'm not privy to the unreported details. But I think a distinction could/should be made that the fishing-birds case did not in the least corrupt the "truth" of the scene/situation. I'm not at ALL sure the same can be said for the photos or other "evidence" that newspapers and othrer outlets choose NOT to publish for editorial or other reasons. We're being manipulated every day in virtually every way. I guess we might as well get used to it.

Sabrina Harman and Kelly Bryant were not married when Sabrina wrote her letters home. However, Sabrina referred to Kelly as her "wife," which means it's her word, which means we're quoting her. We're not making any statement about gay marriage here, merely quoting the word the subject used.

Manipulation is nuthin! All photography is selective and partial anyway, and if you then take the "selection" process which photo editors do, overt manipulation actually seems trivial. Ever wondered for example how the Guardian - a well respected newspaper - decides which "truthful" photos of someone like, say Fred Goodwin, (or Dubya) to use when accompanying a story? Shall we pick one showing him thoughtful and reflective, or one where he looks like an arrogant twit....

Just because an ethical code does not have a bright shining line does not make it useless or even flawed. In fact, the opposite. Much in the world is easily discerned as black or white. But not everything. An ethical code that entirely lacks a fuzzy boundary is one that is both unfair and unrealistic.

If someone feels they're not up to the task of dealing with the ethical implications, then they should stay out of the profession. They are unqualified.

That said, there are huge differences in the degree of manipulations possible. Implying that all manipulation is equal (and hence unjudgeable) is unreal.

As for holding photographs to a higher standard... if that is even being done and I've not seen anyone provide concrete evidence of that, just assumptions and accusations...

People see photographs and they don't analyze what they see, they remember them as visual experience. Words do not become incorporated in the same manner. People remember and reference visual memories without context or conscious association. That's not a matter of education, it's neurophysiology. To say that photos should not be treated any differently from the written word ignores a physical reality that they are NOT perceived in the same way.

I will add to the concern expressed about the need for a spoiler alert regarding the Fenton photographs by saying that if the reviewer is going to spoil the story by reviewing the conclusion, at least get the conclusion right. I'm referring to the reviewer's comment, "Believing Is Seeing contains much more, including, somewhat to my pleasure, what I see as proof that Reuters knowingly distributes anti-Israeli propaganda photography." This is very misleading as to what Chapter 5, "It All Began with a Mouse" contains. While complaints of Reuters photographers engaging in staging and falsification is alluded to and the rash of toy-in-rubble photos seems to support that, Morris' typically thorough and meticulous examination of the original Mickey Mouse amidst the rubble photo by Ben Curtis demonstrates there was no staging in this original controversial toy-in-rubble photo. Interestingly, what the reviewer "sees as proof" appears to be another example of Believing is Seeing.